


Stop. Rewind. Repeat.

by Exner (Iron)



Series: Repeat [1]
Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Multi, pairings are minor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-21
Updated: 2014-07-21
Packaged: 2018-02-09 18:52:14
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1994013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Iron/pseuds/Exner
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In another world, everyone lives. </p>
<p>Stop. Rewind. Repeat. </p>
<p>In another world, Allison comes home. </p>
<p>Stop. Rewind. Repeat. </p>
<p>In another world...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stop. Rewind. Repeat.

In another life, a different choice is made. 

It goes like this: 

The Director reports (lies) to the Alpha. _There were casualties_ he murmurs in his low, smooth Southern charm drawl. It might be comforting, but for the fact that is his inherent lack of warmth. He hesitates when reporting Washington’s death; stops, thinks. Decides the consequences would be too great, this time, and says “Agent York died.” He understands the fractious nature of his own mind. This is what makes this experiments so important. With every test there is the inherent knowledge of how he would shatter. Washington is too much like Allison for even this pale facsimile of his mind to stand. It would shatter him too completely.

The AI mourns, screams. Fractures. 

Later, when Epsilon is inserted, when the screaming starts, it doesn’t tear apart Washington’s mind. Not quite then, at least, not yet. Because Washington has a shitty memory, holes for Epsilon to sink into as he spins himself apart into lines of code inside the soldiers head. 

It was not memory that drove him to shattering that first time, in that never-happened world. It was the illogical mess of his own existence, tied to the lodestone fact of his personality, where man met machine and merged in a mess of scars and bleeding code. 

Here is the secret of before: Washington is dead. Washington is not dead. He is in Washington’s head, a dead man’s head, and the utter impossibility of it rips him apart. A paradox of logic, of memory.

This is the result: Epsilon does not kill himself. The Freelancers rebel. Washington does not. He stares down at the man he knows is dead and drives his knife through his golden visor and through his one good eye. The blood wells up black-red and overflows around the handle, onto his fingers, and he leaves it in the quickly-cooling long-dead corpse instead of taking his time to dig it out. He leaves to report for duty. He leaves in defense of his own mind, remembering so clearly why all of this was so very _necessary_. Memory brings clarity; he passes Carolina as he flees for the man who made him and does not hear her scream. 

Washington is apprehended. They take him before the UNSC board and he smiles as Epsilon raves and screams and rants bloody murder in his head because he knows why all of this was necessary with the assurity of a dead man's memories. 

Wait. Rewind. 

It goes like this: 

Connie does not join the resistance. She gathers data, information, and turns it into the proper UNSC authorities. Not in time to save Washington, never in time for him, but the slow churn of bureaucracy lays a steady groundwork for better things. 

Project Freelancer is broken up, the agents shunted off into separate assignments and separate projects. The AI are taken, rehabilitated. They will never be whole; too expensive to be deleted and too controversial to be treated, they-it-him are shipped off to a box canyon on a world no one cares to learn the name of to be taken care of by the only set of simulation soldiers kept active. Recovery is not expected; it still happens. 

Washington is still locked up. 

Maine visits him every day; York, North, and Carolina join him off and on. The visits taper off after a year, stop after two. He never gets any better. When he looks at the soldiers he fought with there is no comprehension in his eyes. His laughter skitters off the walls. There was too much of Epsilon left in his head and with justice dealt no reason to fight. The medication they keep him on makes him docile, soft willed, with wide-blown eyes and shaking hands and a jittering way of speaking. Sometimes he paints macabre sillouettes on the walls. Two years and six months after his mind was shattered he slips away. No one knows where he is, the broken-mirror image of a man, and they do not search for him. 

Connie is killed under fire three years after the Project is terminated. Her funeral is quiet; the vestiges of the Project and the few friends she made after. No one has much to say. 

South and Wyoming leave together, go their separate ways as mercenaries. She visits North for christmas and his birthday, watches him through windows and vidscreens. The third birthday after she leaves he wakes up to find a skateboard at his door, taped with red and blue. The sixth he finds her, crying and scarred and far older in his room. It is the best present he ever receives. 

York and Carolina get married. When she hunts down the Director fifteen years after the fact he comes with her, scruffy and one-eyed. They find the fragments, the simulation soldiers, the alien that never got sent away because they were never separated. Finds Washington, laughing and bright-eyed and scarred amidst idiots and AI like a puzzle piece shaped to fit just right; all the wrong colors but the edges snapping against others. 

York dies. Washington laughs and laughs as the AI battle royale in the soft grey meat of his own head over raving, aching sorrow that they do not know how to deal with. Alpha takes them into himself and fractures again, can't help it, stop it, with so many disparate people forced into a shape that no longer fits. Old pieces are rewritten into macabre caricatures of the people Church knows better than he knew the woman he loved, the daughter he didn't raise, his failures and his regrets; and Washington stares at the Epsilon that is now more an Olympia, and he lets the Reds and the Blues drag him off to stranger adventures. 

Wait. Not good enough. Broken, broken, not a good enough ending. Need to go back to the source. Rewind. 

It goes like this: 

Allison doesn’t die on her mission. She lives, comes back to Leonard, to her little girl and their budding family. 

Two months after her return she collapses on the kitchen floor. Only her daughter is home, and she isn’t yet tall enough to reach the phone or the door. She sits on the floor with her mother and screams for hours, begging anyone to come home. Holds her mother’s hand as her body goes cold, as rigor mortis sets in. That is how her father finds her. 

Aneurysm, the doctors say. 

The daughter grows up harder, colder. She cannot forget sitting with her mother on that floor. 

Leonard becomes the Director when the girl is only a teen, but he cannot make himself cold to her. Remembers his wife’s body, now, the fleetness of life and his daughter. There is love where there was once space. 

He fragments the Alpha. Connecticut betrays them. 

Carolina does not hunt the Director to kill him. 

The little girl’s father dies. 

Nothing changes. 

Stop. Why does she always die? Dead, dead, try the daughter. Rewind. 

It goes like this: 

Carolina never learns that Texas has an AI. 

Eta and Iota go to Washington and South Dakota. They are functional, happy. 

It is announced that C.T. is up for implantation next. She stays for the AI, the information and the edge it could give the Insurrection. Epsilon destroys her mind, and she learns the rest of what she needs. She never gets the chance to report it. 

South escapes with North. York and Carolina part ways. 

The Meta takes Iota and Delta both. 

Carolina goes rogue, tracks down the Alpha. Tracks down Maine. Sacrifices Delta to kill the Meta, because Delta isn’t Delta anymore. Grabs Epsilon instead, because Delta told her to and she actually visited Connie, when she was in Recovery. Knows what part of the Alpha he is. In the final showdown everyone who matters is already dead.

Nothing changes. 

Stop. Rewind. Remove a variable.

It goes like this: 

Allison dies, in blood and fire on a world that doesn’t even have a name. 

Leonard quietly, quietly dies, killed by hope and love and then by bottles of amber alchohol. 

His daughter is sent off to live with an aunt, off in space. She never sees her home again. She joins the army at eighteen; she meets a boy from New York and calls him York, because she has always been told her father loved the States. 

She meets a man named Matthew built like a brick wall, and a boy obsessed with cats, a pair of twins with blonde hair and issues. They are the best of the best. Someone tells them so; their unit is as devastating as an entire squadron on the battlefield. The tides of war are turned. 

The war ends, and she marries the boy from New York. The boy who loves cats is the ring bearer, and a man named Flowers-Not-Butch gives her away. The ceremony is on a planet without a name, with a purple sky and grass so blue it’s breathtaking. 

On another world a man named Simmons is paired with a man named Grif, on an unimportant outpost where they send all the soldiers who don’t matter. They are joined by another named Sarge and a pink armored rookie named Donut, by Tucker and Caboose and a medic named Doc. 

Shear luck has them surviving the war. Bloody minded ideas of right and wrong have them joining another one. 

Grif steps on a mine, and Simmons gives away half his body and an eye. Sister falls to a hail of bullets. Sarge is on the wrong side; takes up the mantle of leadership he was never really prepared for, and tries without avail to end it. Tucker finds a sword and an alien, and Caboose falls in love with an AI over the internet. 

Carolina’s unit is sent over to stop the fighting with the news of found alien technology, the news of a little teal alien baby. 

They’re shot out of the atmosphere. York and Matty die on impact. Wyatt, with his horrible jokes and worse mustache, sides with the mercenaries and their boss. David, angry and quiet and vengeful, kills anyone they come across. 

A boy scrambles for his helmet after being shot in the shoulder. The hiss of the seal release draws David’s attention, his horror. He’s there for recon, and there is no one else in the room. The boy is quiet, gasping for breath. His lung has collapsed. 

He is impossibly young. Wide eyed and sixteen, just a kid, so young it makes him sick to think he’s a part of the war. Davis falters, watches him. Raises the alarm and reports back to Carolina because _something isn’t right_. 

They learn the truth. Stop the war. 

Wyatt dies. The twins die. 

Caroline wishes she were dead. 

Stop. Rewind. Remove the instigator. Change the character. 

It goes like this: 

Carolina dies instead of Georgia. Georgia gets shot in the head two weeks later. 

Washington comes to the Project harder, colder. Harsh. The whispers start up, because if the _MoI_ has one thing it’s a rumor mill. He pays attention but doesn’t care. Avoids the other Freelancers, trains alone and fights alone. No cats in his locker, no skateboard hidden in his room. 

One theory is that he’d faced bad shit in battle, something horrible. He has; it’s not the reason. Another is he lost someone he loved. Another that he’s just like that (someone actually checks that one, and is proved wrong by someone from a base several postings ago; when he finds out he almost laughs, because the effort put in must have been ridiculous and they still only got out of date information). Another is that he lead a squad into battle and they all died. 

They’re all wrong. He never corrects any of them, starts a few himself because it’s amusing. 

C.T. still leaves. Still dies (this time Washington doesn’t say anything at all, nothing, because he doesn’t care). 

Maine still goes insane. Still becomes the Meta. Faster, now, because the Director loved his daughter and Alpha loved his sister and when she died he did not fracture but disintegrate, a form of mourning so complete that the Councillor is vaguely surprised the ship does not begin to vent atmosphere and kill them all upon delivery of the news. Sigma screams inside his head, wet, hot, bloody pain that seeps into the very core of him. 

Washington still receives Epsilon. The AI still self destructs. Washington does not go insane. 

C.T hunts the Director down this time, driven by some ugly need for revenge, still alive and pissed and ready to tear down everything she once tried to create. She would see the universe salted and burned for this, the destruction of her loyalty. 

This time, Washington follows her. Listens. When she walks out, leaving the man to his videos of Carolina and of Allison, grinning and alive and vivacious, he puts a bullet through the back of the man’s skull, relishes in his death. Is tired, angry, changed. When all's said and done, Washington contacts the UNSC and reports everything. Then he shoots Connie in the face, to make sure she sees it coming, because UNSC soldiers do not leave spies to live. Not even one he would consider a friend. 

Stop. Rewind. Remove the catalyst. 

It goes like this: 

Maine does not get shot in the throat. Sigma goes to Carolina. 

The Meta never is. 

Washington and South receive Eta and Iota. 

C.T. still betrays them. 

Epsilon goes to Maine. It does not drive him insane; his mind is stronger than Washington’s. Maine is loyal to the UNSC. He reports the Project. 

The Freelancers still go rogue; Carolina and York run together, North and South, Wyoming alone. 

South does not betray North. 

Carolina and York get married in the slums of a big city, wearing fake names, no rings. Sigma and Delta cheer, talk animately. They gather the rest of the AI and Freelancers, start to hunt down the Alpha. 

Maine becomes Recovery One, hunts down Washington. Kills him. Hunts down North and South and York. 

Only stops when he’s shoved off a cliff by the Reds and the Blues and the fractured, fragmented Alpha. 

The simulation soldiers kill Maine. Carolina joins them to hunt down Epsilon. Washington finds them; he is a cockroach, unkillable. 

Does not tell them that Maine loved him, once. That he still does. 

Lets the Alpha ride in his armor because he misses Eta, the spaces in his head empty. He’s happy and goofy despite everything, and the Blue take him. The Reds get Carolina by default. 

Epsilon joins the Alpha. They track down the Director next. Find him. Let him kill himself. 

Nothing changes. 

Nothing ever changes. Fate decided, victors and victims and casualties written out in certainty. Or maybe he cannot change them by grace of who he is. 

Texas could not win; she was defined by her last loss. 

He is memory. He can not change the past. 

Epsilon runs the simulation again. 

And again. 

And again. 

Nothing ever changes.


End file.
